The Bill Maher Effect
For the past year, Donald Trump has made the Kennedy Center all about him. Last night, the comedian revealed the limits of that approach.
For 13 months, President Trump has been the chairman, muse, occasional programmer, and featured artist at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His centrality—perhaps even more than his name on the building—helps explain why s...
The strongest version of this narrative is that Trump’s stewardship of the Kennedy Center reflects his broader political and cultural project: centralizing institutions around his personal brand while testing the limits of institutional resistance. The Maher controversy is a microcosm of this tension—Trump’s initial rejection of the award suggests an attempt to control the narrative, but the Kennedy Center’s reversal demonstrates that even in a Trump-dominated space, some autonomy remains. The e...